Doctors with an attached Medical Shop

Medicine is the noble profession and doctors are being considered next to God in our culture. Not only in our culture, in our mythology also doctors are given a high rank and considered sacred. Doctors are believed to inherit the capacity of healing people from their sufferings. ‘Vaidyo Narayano Hari', meaning doctors are equivalent to God in Sanskrit is our belief on them. Indian system of medicine Ayurveda has described the role of considering doctors as one among the family members. Now, the modern medicine has reduced to business and doctors are acting as agents of pharmaceutical companies.

Earlier there used to be no connection between medicine shop and doctors. Rarely medicines which were being prescribed were to be given by doctor itself and the quantity was very low. No big capsules or tablets were ruling the medicines. Importance was given to treating the patient and not the disease. The practice of making patients to believe that disease is just an assumption had healed many patients. It is being rightly said and proved ‘Faith heals than medicines’. But now the place of faith is being taken away by medicines. Doctors will prescribe a long list of medicines for even common body temperature variation.

Every doctor who has a clinic is default having a medical shop with him/her. The medicine which doctor prescribes is nowhere available except at his medical shop. The medicines will be of a particular company and if you spend some more time at the medical shop, you can see the gifts given by that company such as wall clock, furniture and some times even the dress, making us to understand doctor is being biased to give medicine of that company itself. In other words, doctor has taken the agency or franchise of a particular company. Doctors are in a way used by the pharmaceutical companies as their marketing agencies paying perks! May be a few doctors having medical shops with a view to help patients rather than making them to wander for necessary medicines. But in most of the cases doctors own medical shop for making money.

A noble profession, highly respected in the society is being reduced to money making business. If you observe carefully in many places doctors in government service are doing private practice owning a medical shop. It may be an astonishing fact to know that 75% of by-pass surgeries done all over the world were done unnecessarily. Human heart has its own mechanism and disaster recovery system, heart creates its own bypass when there is an obstacle to the blood flow in the heart but still doctors perform surgeries, need not to say explicitly money is involved in it from the pharmaceutical world making doctors to perform surgeries.